Audio

How to spell audio

5 letters · 3 syllables

How to pronounce audio

Say the part in capitals loudest.

What does audio mean?

1. nounSound, especially when it is recorded, transmitted, or reproduced electronically.
2. adjectiveRelating to sound, or to its recording, transmission, or reproduction.

Audio in a sentence

• noun

  The video played fine, but the audio was completely muted.

• adjective

  He connected the speakers to the audio output on the back of the laptop.

• noun

  She edited the podcast to clean up the background noise in the audio.

• adjective

  The library lends out books in both print and audio format.

Where does audio come from?

Language of origin: Latin

This word comes straight from the Latin verb audire, which simply meant 'to hear'. In the early twentieth century, as recorded and broadcast sound became a commercial technology, engineers and inventors needed a tidy label for the sound portion of a signal, and they reached for the Latin root, coining 'audio' as a counterpart to the older 'video' (from Latin videre, 'to see'). The two words were deliberately built as a matched pair, which is why we still speak of audio and video together today. The same audire root also gives English 'audible', 'audience', 'audition' and 'auditorium', all tied to the idea of hearing or listening. Because the spelling keeps the original Latin 'audi-' intact, the tricky part for writers is simply remembering the 'au' opening rather than a single vowel.

How the word is built

• audi- (from Latin audire: to hear)
• -o (combining/noun suffix)